Site Mobile Navigation

David vs. Goliath

Shortly after 9 p.m. on a dark October night in 1863, four intrepid Confederates launched one of the most daring attacks of the Civil War. Nestled into the David, a cigar–shaped vessel 50 feet long and barely 5 feet in diameter, they steamed toward one of the Union Navy’s mightiest warships, the New Ironsides, on blockade duty in Charleston harbor. Each member of the crew — Capt. William T. Glassell, the pilot Walker Cannon, the assistant engineer J. H. Toombs and the seaman James Sullivan — carried a shotgun and revolver. But the real damage they intended was to come from a 134-pound explosive charge of at the end of a 30-foot spar extended from the prow of their vessel.

Sitting low in the water, the attacker was invisible until it was within 50 yards of its target. When challenged by the watch commander, Ensign C. T. Howard, Captain Glassell responded with a shotgun blast, killing him. Within seconds, the torpedo struck the New Ironsides, detonating about seven feet below the waterline just under the starboard quarter. The explosion rocked the 3,500-ton warship and created a geyser that swamped its Confederate attacker, dousing the fire in the small ship’s boiler and rendering her powerless. Cannon, who could not swim, remained aboard, but his three shipmates abandoned ship.

Shortly afterward Toombs, the assistant engineer, returned and was able to rekindle the fire in the boiler and steer the ship back to the safety of the inner harbor. Glassell spent over an hour in the water before being pulled out by a passing schooner and turned over the next morning to the Union Navy. Sullivan was discovered clinging to the anchor chain of the New Ironsides and was put in irons.

The David’s attack had an impact well out of proportion to the actual damage it had caused. Union casualties were minimal: the death of Ensign Howard, a seaman’s broken leg and severe contusions to the ship’s master at arms. At first glance, the New Ironsides appeared to have weathered the attack with no lasting damage, although later inspections would uncover internal damage that necessitated the ship’s departure from its station to Philadelphia for repairs. The immediate psychic impact, however, was considerable. A new, potent threat to Union naval forces had appeared.

Although this was the only successful assault by a torpedo boat on a Union ship, several other attempts followed, and Union sailors on watch at night claimed innumerable sightings. Union ships fit themselves with outriggers and netting to repel future attacks, and small boats circled the larger warships after dark, on alert to potential incursions. The success of the David also led the Union Navy to cluster its ships together at night for protection, which allowed the Confederates free run of the Charleston inner and outer harbors after dark.

Adm. John Dahlgren, commander of the Union’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, claimed outrage, proposing to send the two captured Confederates to New York for trial and execution for “using an engine of war not recognized by civilized nations.” Dahlgren’s indignation, however, appears to have been feigned, for within days of the attack he was imploring his superiors in Washington to ensure that “torpedo Boats be made and sent here with dispatch.” A naval innovator in his own right, Dahlgren recognized the significance of the David’s attack. “Among the many inventions with which I have been familiar,” he wrote, “I have seen none which have acted so perfectly at first trial. The secrecy, rapidity of movement, control of direction and precise explosion indicate … the introduction of the torpedo element as a means of certain warfare. It can be ignored no longer.” His enthusiasm was spurred, no doubt, by the fact that diagrams for the David were found in the possession of both Glassell and Sullivan when they were captured.

The path leading to the David’s attack on Oct. 5, 1863, was hardly a straight one. The coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida were under the command of Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard. Reassigned to Charleston in the middle of 1862 by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who was incensed at the general’s failure to defend Corinth, Miss., against Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces, the general sought from the outset to go on the offensive against the Union blockade. It was “an urgent necessity to destroy, if possible, part or all of thee ironclads,” he wrote Capt. John R. Tucker, spurring the risk-averse Confederate naval commander in Charleston to take action. “I consider it of the utmost importance to the defenses of the works at the entrance to the harbor that some effort should be made to sink either the Ironsides or one of the monitors.”

Stymied by Tucker’s defensive strategy, which was endorsed by the Confederate naval secretary Stephen Mallory, Beauregard turned to the development of an alternative with which to challenge the blockade. Convinced of the lethal potential of small torpedo boats, he embraced the work of Capt. Francis D. Lee, a member of his staff, who had invented a new chemical fuse that promised to revolutionize the delivery of explosives. Lee’s device placed a number of fuses — small lead tubes capped with hemispherical heads of very thin metal, inside of which there were small glass vials of sulfuric acid — in a metal casing filled with gunpowder. When the heads on the casings were broken by impact with the target, the acid ignited the powder to create an explosion. Sent to Richmond to sell the idea to the War Department, Lee was referred instead to the Navy, which rejected his idea in large part because he was an officer in the Confederate Army.

Frustrated, Beauregard next determined to have the torpedo boats built locally. The first of these, the David, was built at Stony Landing, a plantation on the Cooper River 30 miles from Charleston, and was the result of a most unusual alliance. The driving force behind the effort was St. Julien Ravenal, who was joined by Captain Lee; a former railroad engineer named Ross Winan; and David Ebaugh, the assistant superintendent of a local niter works. Ravenal’s slaves performed much of the labor.

After training to become a doctor, Ravenal decided that he found medical work distasteful and turned instead to the study of microscopy, natural history and physiology with the noted Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz. He next pursued chemistry, experimenting with the production of lime on his plantation and eventually founding a company that produced much of the lime purchased by the Confederacy. After volunteering during the siege of Fort Sumter, Ravenal was appointed first as surgeon for the 24th South Carolina Infantry and then as director of the Confederate Hospital at Columbia, S.C., before being asked to build a torpedo boat.

The David, supposedly named for the biblical figure by Ravenal’s wife, was essentially built from spare parts. Powered by a steam engine salvaged from a locomotive, the torpedo boat was made from unseasoned lumber and held together by scavenged metal parts. Ebaugh supervised the construction (he would go on to build two more torpedo boats) and Winan engineered the power plant. Once completed and filled with ballast, less than 10 inches of the ship (excepting the funnel) was visible above the waterline. Powered with anthracite coal, which burned without smoke, the David achieved speeds of up to six knots. Steered by the captain, who maneuvered the wheel with his feet, the boat’s weaponry consisted of an explosive charge at the end of a 30-foot metal spar mounted on the bow of the ship

Related

Finishing construction during the summer of 1863, Ravenal arranged to have the David taken to Charleston by rail. There, on Sept. 18, he accepted Captain Glassell’s offer to lead the ship. Glassel was an experienced naval officer who had been serving in China aboard the Union ship the Hartford when the Civil War broke out. Upon his return in late 1861, his refusal to take an oath of loyalty to the Union led to his imprisonment for eight months at Fort Warren in Boston harbor. After a prisoner exchange, he served aboard the Confederate ship the Chicora at Charleston, where he became enamored with the idea of forming a fleet of torpedo boats. Denied this opportunity because of his low rank, Glassell nonetheless experimented with torpedoes mounted on rowboats and in April 1863 launched an abortive attack on the Union steam frigate the Powhatan.

His target six months later dwarfed his torpedo boat. The New Ironsides measured 249 feet long and was clad in 4-and-a-half-inch-thick wrought iron armor that extended 4 feet below the waterline and was backed by 21 inches of wood. The ship carried a crew of 449 officers and men and had been on station in Charleston harbor since the end of the previous January. By time of the David’s attack the following October, the warship had played important roles in both battles of Charleston harbor.

Glassell’s brave attack did little to halt the Union blockade. Admiral Dahlgren made good on his promise to send the Confederate captain north, where he was imprisoned for 16 months at Fort Lafayette in New York harbor. Exchanged once again in the spring of 1865, Glassell was given command of the ironclad Fredericksburg on the James River. In the wake of the evacuation of Richmond, Glassell blew up the ship. He spent the last days of the war attached to a naval brigade that was repurposed to fight on land. He later moved to Southern California, where he laid out the city of Orange. He died in Los Angeles in 1879.

Meanwhile, the David served as a prototype for several other torpedo boats (known generically as Davids) and engaged in unsuccessful attacks on the Memphis in March 1864 and the Wabash on April 18, 1864. Unlike its far more famous cousin, the submarine H. L. Hunley, which sank in Charleston harbor in 1864, the ultimate fate of the David remains a mystery.

Sources: William T. Glassell, “The David: The First Submarine of the Civil War”; James M. McPherson, “War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1865”; Ivan Musicant, “Divided Waters: The Naval History of the Civil War”; Milton F. Perry, “Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare”; Mark K. Ragan, “Submarine Warfare in the Civil War.”

Rick Beard is an independent historian and exhibition curator, and co-author of the forthcoming National Park Service publication “Slavery in the United States: A Brief Narrative History.”

What's Next

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.